1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to information technology, and more particularly to a search system and method thereof for searching commercial information, wherein a search request and a search result are both confined to predetermined languages so as to optimize a search application for particular users.
2. Description of Related Arts
With the advance of information technology, searching information through Internet has become part of their daily life for many people. A typical search process usually involves the submission of a search request to a search server which is linked to a particular search database, a matching of the search request with the relevant information in that search database, and production of a search result by the search server, wherein the search result is transmitted from the search server to the user's terminal and displayed by a displaying device, such as a monitor.
As a matter of fact, the majority of websites posted on Internet are in written in English. This is partly because English, being recognized international language, is widely accepted all over the world. Conventional search engines, such as yahoo and google are usually user-friendly and interactive so that they present little problems for daily applications.
Difficult problems however, arise when one is trying to search a local website using an English-based search engine, or indeed search engines in any other language different that of the local website. For example, using an English version yahoo to search for a Chinese or a French local website (which do not written in English) is very inconvenient. In order to resolve such difficulty, some search engines incorporates translation function whereby websites in a particular local language is translated by a predetermined dictionary so that the local websites (after translation) are matched and sorted alongside with the language of the search request so as to broaden the scope of the corresponding search result.
An associated difficulty in this area is that no one can guarantee the quality of the translation so that the search result may turn out to contain a vast number of unrelated websites. The situation will be even worse when the search request is inaccurately translated. At the end of the day, it may be that the search result contains web data which are completely irrelevant.
Moreover, even though the translation per se is satisfactory in quality, the relevant websites may not be of relevance with respect to the search request. More specifically, the search engine may match the search request with the registered websites in its database and pick up those websites which have been written in foreign languages and contain the relevant search request as translated by the information center. A problem for this method is that since the search request as translated is matched word by word from the websites contained in the database, as a result, the website picked may be totally out of context and therefore, totally irrelevant to the search result.